This my spoiler-filled review Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Only read on if you have seen the movie, or you don’t care about having it all spoiled!
What happens when you hire a director whose method of storytelling is setting up mystery box after mystery box to create the finale of your series?
You end up with a movie that sets up more questions than answers. You end up with answers that go for shock value over narrative cohesion. You end up with a messy conclusion that backpedals or ignores characters, set-ups, and revelations from the last movie — the most obvious example is the irrelevance of Rose Tico. The promising array of story threads left open after The Last Jedi are nowhere to be seen as the director winks at the audience and says, remember the things you’ve seen in Star Wars? Wanna see them again? You like Star Wars, dontcha?
I do like Star Wars. I like that it’s a grand fairytale set in space with robots and wizards. I like that it’s tragic and cheesy and hopeful. I love the characters, and how they are the true heart of the epic franchise.
The Rise of Skywalker tries so desperately to please Star Wars fans, but it does so by hitting the audience over the head with nostalgia. The Force Awakens was similarly nostalgia-heavy, but in this installment the nostalgia is given more weight than the plot’s structure or the character arcs. In it’s best moments, The Rise of Skywalker is a fun and fast adventure. In its worst, it fundamentally misunderstands and misuses the core characters.
The movie begins, without a second to take it in, the return of Emperor Palpatine. Never is an explanation given for how the heck he survived, why it took him so long, or why his plan is so stupid. He’s always been controlling everything from the shadows, apparently, like the true phantom menace he is. Snoke, our former big bad, was nothing but a puppet of Palpatine’s — quite literally. We see a big vat of pickled Snoke heads.
Palpatine recruits Kylo Ren to kill the last jedi — Rey, currently training with Leia — and Kylo proceeds to reforge his mask for no reason other than to sell new action figures. He spends the first half of the movie bumbling around with his emo boyband, the Knights of Ren. Kylo’s cartoonish threats and painfully bad expostion-dialogue in the first half are a true waste of actor Adam Driver’s talent.
Rey spends the first half bumbling around also, with Finn and Poe, on a treasure hunt for a thing that leads to a guy who has a clue to a thing in a place to get a thing to find a place to do a thing.
A big emphasis is placed on Rey, Finn, and Poe as a heroic trio — a Han, Luke, and Leia for the modern age. This doesn’t work, because Rise of Skywalker is the finale of a trilogy, and while these three characters have fun banter and good chemistry, they have never been the heart of these movies. Poe and Rey didn’t even meet until the final minutes of The Last Jedi.
The emotional heart of this trilogy is Rey’s journey of self-discovery, and Kylo Ren’s struggle between light and dark. Both characters grapple with their lineage; Kylo has the pressure of descending from the most powerful family in the galaxy — who, by the way, suck at parenting; Rey wants a family, somewhere she belongs, but finds she comes from nothing, as we learn in The Last Jedi. Her power is not because she’s from some great bloodline.
Except, just kidding, Rey is a Palpatine.
In the most infuriating retcon ever written, The Rise of Skywalker undoes the heartbreaking revelation of Rey’s parentage, and the message that you don’t need to come from something to be somebody. Instead of running with the concept of Rey forging her own place in the galaxy, an arc that promised to be inspiring, we are treated to the hilariously bad concept of Rey as the granddaughter of the most evil guy who ever lived.
I guess Palpatine had kids at some point, but that is not something I want to have to think about ever again.
There are the bones of a good story here: A child born of darkness who fights against it…except, hang on, that’s already been told in the Star Wars movies, with Luke, the son of Vader.
This is like a bad parody of the story we already know.
At this point Director JJ Abrams and co seem to have decided to cherry-pick fan theories off Reddit and make them into an incoherent series of fast-paced scenes: Finn is force sensitive, Poe has a secret past, darkside Rey, Leia was actually a jedi the whole time, Luke pulls his x-wing out of the water in the most unsubtle callback to Empire Strikes Back. The list goes on. The whole movie begins to play like a checklist, forgetting character arcs to make sure cool moments happen. The plot should be driven by the characters. But not only are the characters strung along by the plot, the plot itself is driven by the desire to feed nostalgia and right the perceived wrongs that many fans — and apparently Abrams, too — found within The Last Jedi.
One of the most disappointing yet unavoidable aspects of Rise of Skywalker is Leia’s story. Carrie Fisher tragically passed, and so old footage of her from the previous movies was inserted and written around. It doesn’t work well. Leia would have been the character to tie the story together — from training Rey, handing over leadership of the resistance to Poe, helping Finn understand his force sensitivity, and of course, reaching out to her son. The bones of this story are present, but not realised. Sadly, there is no way around this.
The only interesting character arc we get is Kylo Ren’s rushed redemption. Leia dies calling his name, and Kylo’s like, I guess I gotta be good now. He’s helped along by the memory of his father, in a cheesy but nevertheless heart-wrenching scene that mirrors Han’s death in The Force Awakens, only this time the persona of Kylo Ren dies, and Ben Solo is reborn. The moment works because Harrison Ford and Adam Driver are so good at what they do. If this movie played out Kylo’s redemption arc as the A-Plot and had time to breathe, it would have been glorious.
For the rest of his screen time, redeemed Ben Solo doesn’t say a single word (unless you count his comedic “ow”, which is frankly unfair). He doesn’t need dialogue though; actions speak louder than words, and Adam Driver completely sells Kylo Ren’s transformation into Ben Solo with nothing but facial expressions and body language.
Rey tackles her inner darkness, which isn’t really her own, just something she inherited. Her story is interwoven with Kylo Ren’s, but even her complex connection to him is reduced to something inherited: a “dyad in the force” because they’re both grandchildren of Sith. Alright. The movie seems to build to a point of them fighting the Emperor together — except when they finally stand before him, they last about two seconds before Ben is yeeted into a pit. The destruction of Palpatine ends up coming at the hands of Rey, who enters into the avatar state (I find it ironic that I binge-watched Avatar: The Last Airbender a few months ago, and then this movie borrowed heavily from it). All the ghosts of Jedi past come along to help Rey ‘rise’ in what should be an inspiring moment, but it’s ruined by the cheesy line “I am all the Jedi” and the lack of Ben’s involvement.
And then Rey dies.
Let’s take a moment to acknowledge the ridiculous amount of fake-out deaths Rise of Skywalker gave us: Chewbacca gets blown up, C-3PO gets his memory wiped, Zorri Bliss is on an exploding planet, and Rey falls over dead. None of these “deaths” are given time to make you feel the weight of them, and then they’re reversed anyway.
The impact of Leia’s death should have been devastating, but at that point, the movie itself doesn’t pay much attention to her. She at least gets a better send off then her son; Ben Solo’s death is poignant in that he finally achieved his goal of finishing what his grandfather started — Vader turned to the dark side in an attempt to save the one he cared about from death, and Ben finally achieves it with a selfless act. He revives Rey. They share a kiss, in a tender but unearned moment. He falls over dead. Rey is like huh? and then we immediately move on to partying with the resistance. His character is not acknowledged again. His presence is inexplicably absent from the final scene, where he should’ve appeared as a force ghost.
The whole final scene plays out tone-deaf and self-congratulatory. Rey on Tatooine, at the Lars homestead. The saga ending where it began. This works for the audience, who can appreciate the iconic imagery, but makes little sense for the characters.
Luke hated that place, Leia was only briefly on Tatooine. Rey’s journey started alone on a desert planet, waiting for her family, and it ends alone on a desert planet, with a family of ghosts. There’s something to be said for a circular ending, where a character is back where they started externally, but changed internally. This doesn’t resonate though. Rey found out she did have parents who loved her, but instead continues to lie about her identity. Her triumphant act of taking on the Skywalker name falls flat. Rey is alone but for BB-8 (???????), and the Skywalker legacy will live on through her, the granddaughter of Palpatine, while all the actual Skywalkers are dead.
A miserable end.
Anyway, to make myself feel better, here’s a list of things I like about the movie:
“Dad–” “I know.”
Ahsoka Tano’s voice cameo
The banter between Poe, Finn, and Rey
Rey passing the lightsaber to Ben through their force-bond-thing
Ben’s very Han-esque shrug when he reveals the lightsaber
Babu Frik
Co-generals
Poe’s moment of defeat
“I’m the spy!”
The lightsaber battle on the ruins of the death star
Lightspeed skipping
The costumes are nice
The sets are pretty
The movie, in general, is good-looking
The cast does a good job
John Williams can do no wrong
Kylo got redeemed. I’m very happy about that.
What did you think of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker?
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